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If great crowds make a great stadium, Rogers Centre rocks: Kelly

As pug-ugly as the dome is, it seems more lovable this year, and that’s got everything to do with the people in it.

Blue Jay Edwin Encarnacion heads to the dugout at the Rogers Centre before the start of a game against the Mariners in May. Attendance at the dome has jumped almost 20 per cent this season.
(Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Five years ago, a friend showed me a photo of the press box at the Rogers Centre, taken by his wife. I was in it at the time.

He moved his hand down the frame to the concrete platform we were all sitting on, three levels up.

“Do you see that seam in the concrete?”

Yes.

“You realize it’s at least two inches off?”

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No.

My friend’s an architect. Is that a bad thing? Two inches? Are we in danger?!

“Oh no,” he said. “I wouldn’t think so.”

Architects are like contractors and doctors. Ask a doctor if a 5-year-old is in imminent danger of dying of old age, and she’ll say, “I wouldn’t think so.”

For a while, I spent a lot of time thinking about that seam and looking around for things to hang on to. The Rogers Centre is still standing, five years later. No easier to love, but he was right — it’s solid, permanent.

Torontonians don’t agree on anything (which is itself the glue of the city). We’ve all agreed that we hate the Rogers Centre. It’s a $500 million pillbox. It’s the sports arena Enver Hoxha would have built.

Its curves are not graceful. No matter how green they make the turf, the colours are always washed out. The Toronto sun never seems brighter than it does on TV, beating down on the infield. The term that leaps to mind is “artificial environment.”

Every arena built since the dome aspires to take you back in time. Only the Rogers Centre feels futuristic, and in a bad, Philip K. Dick way.

Though nothing about the structure has changed, it seems more lovable this year. More of a true public space. There is, to my ear, less complaining about it, and more enjoying of it.

That’s got everything to do with the people in it. The dome is filling up again. Attendance has jumped almost 20 per cent. The Jays have cracked the 40,000 mark 11 times so far, the same number as all of last year.

An ugly arena is like an ugly room. Line an ugly room with books and it warms immediately. People serve the purpose of books in a stadium.

You see this when you watch the Jays play in Tampa, in that holding pen they call Tropicana Field. That’s the worst stadium in baseball, and maybe in sports. Soulless. Ghastly in its empty silence. You sit on a squeaky chair at the Trop and you feel bad about moving in the midst of an at-bat. The noise might disturb the pitcher.

The Trop is awful because no one goes there, and no one goes there because . . . ? Because what? Because Tampa Bay is not a real city, and the people who live in and around it feel no connection to its teams. Even the winners. The Trop is a civic problem, not an architectural one.

But all they talk about in Tampa (other than when the whole place is going to be under water) is its building problem.

In an interview with FOX Sports published Monday, Rays owner Stuart Sternberg said the earliest possible exit date is 2027. Back to the conversation about being underwater.

The building debate, which never properly subsides in Florida or anywhere else, has things backward.

A building isn’t the draw. The atmosphere inside the building is.

Take the history and the full houses away, and Fenway Park is a terrible place to watch baseball. It was built in 1911. The seats remain designed to the width of a 1911 posterior. Planning to visit Fenway? Do a juice cleanse first.

The seats around home plate are wedged so close to the batter’s box, it’s a wonder someone isn’t killed by every foul ball.

Also, there are rats.

But Fenway is great. Because it’s full, oddly shaped, authentic and the people who go care.

Great is also generally antithetical to new.

They knocked down Yankee Stadium, built its modern, fraternal twin across 161st St. and ruined everything. The old barn fairly dripped with history (literally, the tunnel walls sometimes wept). The new one is as dry and antiseptic as a hospital. The crowds still come, but they aren’t the same.

This is the same lesson unlearned by corporations who hoover up dive bars and turn them into noxious rip-offs of a London pub. People will still show up for a drink, but they’ll soon lose interest once the atmo has been scrubbed out of the place.

Even if we were to get over our collective trauma of being publicly bled to build the dome and then watching it given away (and we shouldn’t), history suggests whatever new arena they might come up with would be worse.

Even more corporate. More focus-grouped. More luxury boxed. And face it, we’d still need the roof, which is the primary aesthetic problem.

As pug-ugly as the dome is, Toronto doesn’t have a building problem because we don’t have Tampa’s civic problem.

Given a reasonable on-field product, we want to show up. We do so not only to enjoy the game being played, but to take in the feeling of doing so while in the company of our fellow citizens. That’s the secret in Chicago and Boston and all the other great baseball towns. It’s not the team, per se. It’s certainly not the building. It’s the fans.

A great crowd, present and accounted for, equals a great stadium. We don’t need to be sold on that idea. We’ve already bought in.

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